Are You Enjoying The Ride?

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If you get air sick or nervous when you fly, you might not want to think about the incredible journey you are on right now. Imagine earth as a huge space ship, spinning like a top while whizzing around the sun at over seventeen thousand kilometres per hour.

We don't notice that we are moving because there is nothing zipping by our space ship window as we move along. To gauge motion, we compare our situation to some independent reference point. Usually, we take ourselves as that reference point. For example, when you are riding in a car, you know you are moving because the houses and trees appear to shoot backwards.

Now getting back to our planetary ride, remember not only is the earth spinning around its axis, and moving around the sun, but since we are linked to the sun by gravity, we also go wherever the sun goes. Our sun is just one of hundreds of millions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Not only does our sun move relative to other stars, but the stars themselves are moving relative to the centre of our galaxy. It turns out that our sun and the planets around it, hurtle through space at about 69,000 kilometres an hour. We are passengers in a galaxy which is spinning like a pinwheel!

So next time you relax in your chair, thinking how nice it is not to be going anywhere, remember you are really whizzing through space at an incredible speed on a journey of cosmic dimensions.